Previews

Rock Band

We get our rock on as we go hands on with the latest game from the creators of the Guitar Hero series.

Spiffy:

It's Guitar Hero, Drum Hero, Karaoke Revolution and Band Hero all in one game.

Iffy:

Guitar prototype still needs work; online performance is a mystery for now.

At a recent EA press event, there were nearly thirty upcoming games on display for us to check out, seemingly in every corner of its Los Angeles campus. But only one game actually had a line of people waiting to check it out: Rock Band. The new game from Harmonix -- the creators of the hugely successful Guitar Hero games -- looks to expand upon the company's previous successes by adding a drummer and singer to the band, as well as online play. If this seems a little too over the top, think again: even at this early stage, Rock Band is ridiculous fun to play, and it's not hard to imagine it supplanting the Guitar Hero franchise later this year.

Making The Band

The saga of how Rock Band came to be requires a little scorekeeping. The first Guitar Hero games were developed by Harmonix, who'd previously created critically lauded rhythm games like Frequency, Amplitude and Karaoke Revolution. Publishing those initial Guitar Hero games was relative newcomer Red Octane, who, among other things, was responsible for getting the guitar controller created. Eventually, after the success of Guitar Hero, Red Octane was bought by Activision, which went on to publish Guitar Hero II. Harmonix, however, was bought out by MTV, and a split ensued: duties for Guitar Hero III would be handed off to Neversoft, and EA would enter a partnership with MTV and Harmonix to create the new Rock Band game. Among other things, this meant a new guitar controller was in order.

Harmonix had a few prototype guitar controllers on hand for our playtesting, which were remarkably impressive, at least in terms of looks. Forget about the SG model used for the PlayStation 2 or the X-Plorer from the Xbox 360 version: the new guitar looks nothing like a toy and more like a real Fender Stratocaster, down to little tuning pegs, knobs that are actually Start/Select buttons, and a 5-way pickup switch (which will allow you to change the tone of your guitar sound). Gone are the jolly candy-like fret buttons, replaced with wood-colored buttons that match the maple-colored neck; instead, there's a little color stripe on top of the buttons, barely visible from the front but easily seen by the guitarist looking down at the neck.

Our first song was the Black Sabbath classic, "Paranoid." Returning are the four familiar difficulty settings from the Guitar Hero games -- Easy / Medium / Hard / Expert -- and I fired up Expert while the other members of our 4-piece GameSpy / IGN band picked varying settings for their particular instruments.

Just a quick look at the screenshots for Rock Band makes one thing abundantly clear: with four players jamming out together, there's a lot happening onscreen. The screen is basically split into thirds, with the familiar note charts flowing downscreen for guitar, drums and bass. The note charts are now more transparent so you can see more of the band performance in the background, and a small strip of real estate has been set aside at the top of the screen for the vocal track, which more or less looks just like Karaoke Revolution.

Further scrutiny shows a lot of smaller features squeezed into the interface. A small bar along the left shows the relative success of each player, with little icons for all four instruments. In the upper right, you can see the band's overall score, note streak, and current star rating. Each player can also build their own individual note streak, which sits under the note chart for that instrument. Like I said, there's a lot going on. Our demo was done on a fairly good-sized widescreen plasma (the version we saw had a nice menu of TV types to choose from in the video setup -- standard, LCD, plasma, etc), so things weren't that cramped, but we wonder if this might get tougher on an older non-widescreen CRT.